Cognitive Dissidents

The Times has a story that is almost too Fortean to believe - Dissect them alive: order not to be disobeyed - about a Japaneses medical auxiliary who carried out live disections ...

For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience.

Only in the twilight of his life, has Mr Makino begun to talk about the secret which he had carried.

In 1944, as a medical auxiliary in the Japanese Imperial Navy, he was stationed in the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. There he was party to one of the most notorious and poorly chronicled cruelties of the Japanese war effort - the medical dissection and murder of living prisoners of war.

Over the course of four months before the defeat of the Japanese forces in March 1945, Mr Makino cut open the bodies of ten Filipino prisoners, including two teenage girls. He amputated their limbs, and cut up and removed their healthy livers, kidneys, wombs and still beating hearts for no better reason than to improve his knowledge of anatomy.

“It was educational,” he said. “Even today when I go to see doctors, they are impressed by my knowledge of the human body. But if I’m really honest, the reason we did it was to take revenge on these people who were spying for the Americans.

Tags: war crimes, extreme tales, torture

Posted by Dr. K at 9:00 PM | Permalink

There was an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the freebie magazine that comes with "Diario de Cadiz" on Sundays - even with my poor Spanish it struck me - I hope it struck other people in Cadiz Provincia as much ..

(all translations mine - no guarantee they are accurate enough to satisfy anyone I am not mis-translating for my own agenda)

"Si yo viviera ahora en cualquier communidad musulmana, seria un cadaver"

If I lived in any Moslem community I would be a corpse

"Por haber abandonada la fe, por haberme rebelado, por atreverme a luchar contra la submission de las mujeres de Islam"

Because I have abandoned the faith, I have rebelled, and launched a battle against the submission of the women of Islam.

"La Izquierda nos ha abandonado. Nos ha traicionda"

The left have abandoned us. They have betrayed us.

"La izquierda, salvo exceptiones se ha convertido en reaccionaria. Es progresista defender un religion contraria a la vida, que trata a la mujer peor que a animales?"

The left, with some exceptions, have been converted into reactionaries. Is it progressive to defend a religion which is against life? which treats women worse than animals?

After all - some of us on "the left" still feel that women's rights, gay rights, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and other hard won "freedoms" are still important ...

Tags: ayaan hirst ali, womens rights, islam, the silence of the left

Posted by Dr. K at 2:17 PM | Permalink

From the Daily Tautology Daily Telegraph comes this wonderfully tautological headline Under-18s are banned from x-rated exhibition

I'm not one to be fussy (*ahem*), but even I thought the whole point of the "X-Rating" was to stop people under 18 seeing material like this.

Even Wikipedia points out that in the UK the X-Rated certificate was changed, and that from 1970 to 1982 it was redefined as meaning "Suitable for those aged 18 and over" - not that I would rely on Wikipedia in my search for the truth any more than I would rely on Mainstream Media ...

Lazy headline, stupid filler, or a "slow news day".. you decide ...

Tags: x-rated, sex, porn, underage teenage people, daily telegraph, daily tautology, lazy sub-editors, mainstream media, shock horror, sell more papers

Posted by Dr. K at 3:48 PM | Permalink

I scanned this a while ago but haven't got round to posting it yet - its a very old cartoon which I used to have on my wall when I was working in an AI lab at Exeter - but thought it was appropriate in the light of the recent news that Google were working in Artificial Intelligence

In a speech Friday night to the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Google co-founder Larry Page let slip with a truth we all suspected:

“We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”

Hopefully it will turn out like this ...

Tags: google, artificial intelligence, gameshows, tabloids

Posted by Dr. K at 8:01 PM | Permalink

Why am I not surprised that the current war-of-words between the USA and Iran has spun off some of the most obvious propaganda for a long time?

Could it be because we are in the middle of a "New Cold War" - where claim and counter claim are coupled with increasingly outrageous accusations on both sides?

Anyone who might have noticed the Fauxtography Scandal - where an AP photographer was caught red-handed using Photoshop to doctor photographs of the recent conflict between Israel and Lebanon - will not be surprised at this latest stunt ...

First off - look at this picture from the LA-Times - from an article entitled Iran Alleges US Link to Militant Attack"

Bullet cartridges bearing a U.S. insignia and English lettering were among the weaponry seized last week from Sunni militants suspected of killing 11 members of Shiite-dominated Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard, Iranian officials said Sunday.

A photo of the cartridge box, along with an array of other ammunition, was published by Iranian newspapers and news agencies.

Now lets look at a recent photgraph from the Iranian Fars Agency

These arsenals have been confiscated during a raid on the hideout of a terrorist group known as Jondollah in the provincial capital city of Zahedan on Thursday.

Earlier a source said that the relevant documents, photographs and film footages showing that the explosives and arsenals used in the attack were American would be presented to the public and media in the near future.

I am talking about the stock and strap of a gun that, while being clearly visible in the LA-Times photo, has mysteriously vanished in the Fars photo - leaving only part of the stock and strap.

It doesn't make any sense - unless you see the LA-Times photo - and then it makes heaps of sense.

But even though propaganda and disinformation are the order of the day in the New Cold War - what surprises me most is that it takes a site like Little Green Footballs to actually uncover this piece of photo manipulation - surprised because it has long been a truism amongst us long-haired moonbat types that "the media is corrupt" and that "we are being lied to".

It turns out we are right - we are being lied to - but not in the way we would expect.

Why are there no Left wing sites that engage in the kind of investigative reporting that Little Green Footballs and other right wing sites routinely engage in?

You would think that the left would ensure that every time there was evidence of the media lying to the public they would denounce it as evidence that they were right all along, the media is as corrupt as they say it is, and they we are "being lied to" on a daily basis.

Unless it doesn't fit their agenda of course ...

All of this leads to me to conclude two things:

i) We shouldn't shoot the messenger - even if they are bringing the message to promote their own agenda - because they might be right.

They were in this case - and revealed a classic piece of disinformation from the Iranian Fars news agency in the process.

ii) In the "New Cold "War" - just like any other war in history "truth is the first casualty" ...

Tags: little green footballs, fauxtography, propaganda, disinformation, iraq, la-times

Posted by Dr. K at 8:28 PM | Permalink

I've already written about the "Doomsday Clock" here and here - but recent developments mean we only have 5 Minutes to Go ...

By moving the hand of the Clock closer to midnight — the figurative end of civilization — the BAS Board of Directors is drawing attention to the increasing dangers from the spread of nuclear weapons in a world of violent conflict, and to the catastrophic harm from climate change that is unfolding. The BAS statement explains: "We stand at the brink of a Second Nuclear Age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth."

The BAS statement continues: "The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival."

Climate Change???

I thought that the whole idea was to use "the analogy of the human race being at a time that is "minutes to midnight" where midnight represents destruction by nuclear war" - but somehow the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Posted by Dr. K at 12:31 PM | Permalink

I decided to play with Yahoo Pipes to see if it could ease my problems with online news aggravation aggregation.

I've been playing with RSS for the News Machine project for a while now - so I had a few feeds from FeedBurner that i've been using.

To recap for anyone who hasn't read the "News Machine" site - the basic idea is to use Google News to filter the news sources on a set of keywords.

Each set of keywords is thematically related - for example the "Current Obsessions" feed solely filters on the following keywords: cleanfeed, hackers, privacy internet, virus, censorship internet, microsoft security, copyright, drm, riaa, mpaa, piracy internet, piracy sea, malware, blacklists, smartfilter, dmca, spyware, exploit, security internet, and censorware.

Each of these feeds gets a name - e.g. "Current Obsessions" - and for shorthand I've dubbed them "Keyword Cluster Units" (KCU).

News Machine currently uses 10 KCUs and this works very well.

If I drop the feed into e.g. RSS Owl I get a nice listing for each RSS feed - each RSS feed has the "KCU" name as the name of the feed, making it easy to figure out where things have come from - and underneath the "Category" column the keyword shows up as a category.

it makes "the discovery of the new" very easy, my only real problem is that Google News requires an account per every 20 keywords and maintenance is hell if I want to add, delete or (*shudder*) re-cluster any of the keywords.

I've also had problems with online aggravators aggregators, such as Rojo which have a tendency to strip out all the nice keyword information which appears as a "category" ...

The basic RSS dished up from FeedBurner has the following structure for an <item> goes like this:

<item>
<title>
<link>
<guid isPermaLink="false">
<category>
<pubDate>
<description>

.. and of course the text within the <category> tag <\category> is the keyword being searched for in the Google News feed ...

With this in mind I started off making what could possibly be the simplest of Yahoo Pipes feeds - connecting the
the feed for Current Obsessions Keyword Cluster Unit directly into the "pipe output" - like this:

It is probably the simplest pipe there is going - but it is not a pipe at all - once again the all important <category> information field is stripped out - so when I feed the RSS into RSS Owl - I can no longer tell which keyword triggered which story.

The RSS given out by Yahoo pipes filter for an <item> looks like this:

<item>
<title>
<link>
<description>
<pubDate>

Now I might be just being a little picky here - but from my UNIX programming days I remember a "pipe" was just that - it passed everything through the pipe from input to output without changing anything.

What we have here is a "filter" - a pipe that passes some things through unchanged but changes and/or removes others - such as the <category> information ...

I might have missed something - I wondered if the "pipe output" module could be changed to allow stuff through - but it appears that this module is not configurable.

Anyway my conclusion from all this was that "Yahoo Pipes" should be renamed "Yahoo RSS Filters" - if anyone out there has an idea how to get round this limitation - I'd love to here from them.

On the upside, Yahoo Pipes is a nifty network toy for playing around with RSS feeds and aggregating them - even if it doesn't do what I want at the moment - and sometime real soon now I'll be coming back to this topic as I construct a whole KCU inside Yahoo Pipes.

Tags: rss, yahoo pipes, feedburner, rss owl, rojo, news machine, google news

Posted by Dr. K at 8:04 PM | Permalink

You know that things are getting serious when blogs normally about comics and art starts writing pieces like this - but I am not surprised - after all this was a hacker blog about computers and music once upon a time ...

In this piece "Blunting the Senses in the Name of Fairness", David Thompson speaks truth to power about many things - including "Cultural Racism, Islamaphobia, and "Moral Equivalence"

By way of further illustration, Rosie O’Donnell was happy to assert that, "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America." But while red-faced evangelists may say, for instance, that gay people are wicked, damned to hellfire, etc, I don’t know of any internationally renowned Christian leaders who are calling for the imprisonment and killing of gay people. Unlike the supposedly “moderate” Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who insists that gay men and lesbians should be “killed in the worst manner possible.” Not condemned, ‘corrected’, prayed for, or pitied, or any of the usual nonsense spouted by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson et al; but murdered - as brutally as possible.

Guardian regular Karen Armstrong has echoed Reverend Gaffney and dutifully reminded us that all religions have a fundamentalist fringe, and thus, apparently, no further judgment needs to be made regarding theological factors. But the size of that ‘fringe’, its relationship to the mainstream, and its specific ideological features are not the same for all religions. Jehovah’s Witnesses are extremist in certain respects, and they have some pretty bizarre ideas about blood transfusion. And the Amish might be thought of as fundamentalist, too. But where are the eighty or so groups of Amish suicide bombers? Where are the Methodist extremists who want to legally subordinate all non-Methodists as an act of religious observance? Where are the Buddhists who murdered the translators of a ‘blasphemous’ novel while chanting the words of the Buddha as absolute justification? If all religious ideologies are equal in their merits and shortcomings, and equally inclined to homicidal intolerance, shouldn’t we be seeing all of these things, or something like them, roughly in proportion to the size each religion’s following?

Right - so while I note that "Security Theatre" has not made me safer - I also note that the main reason I am not safer is that the threat doesn't seem to come from Baptists, Amish, Atheists, Hindus, Mormons, Buddhists, Gays, Transexuals, Sodomites and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all ...

"Security Theatre" refuses to address a simple point: Not all people are as likely to become suicide bombers ...

There is a skew in the statistics - and it doesn't lead me to conclude that Jehovah's Witnesses are a threat - even if they do really, really want to go to heaven ...

Read it all here - its worth the time ...

Tags: cultural fascism, cultural racism, islam, moral equivalency, fundamentalism

Posted by Dr. K at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Amazing - it turns out that people were cultivating chilli peppers 6,000 years ago and it could help to rewrite the history books as archaeologists discover evidence of earlier farming in Ecuador.

New fossil evidence shows prehistoric people from southern Peru up to the Bahamas were cultivating varieties of chilies millennia before Columbus' arrival brought the spice to world cuisine.

Archaeologists trace food origins not just from curiosity about the ancients' everyday lives. How a crop spreads sheds light on prehistoric travel and trade. In the Middle East, figs were domesticated 11,400 years ago. Wheat wasn't far behind. In the New World, corn was being cultivated around 9,000 years ago.

How do you trace a pepper, which leaves no husk or other easily fossilized evidence? A dozen researchers at seven sites around Latin America kept finding microscopic starch grains on grindstones and cooking vessels and in trash heaps. Finally Perry identified these microfossils as residue from domesticated, not wild, chili species that in some spots even predated the invention of pottery.

Tags: cooking, history, chilli peppers

Posted by Dr. K at 1:20 PM | Permalink

Confirming my attitude that "The Future is a Nice Place to Visit - but I Wouldn't Want to Live There" - i.e. that inbuilt cynicism that many of us older sci-fi computing geeks have about the wonderful potential applications for modern technology in the 21st Century - now we have the smallest RFID chips in the world ...

.. for now .. until they make them "nano-sized" and dust everything .. and then make "nano-sized anti-nano chips" which then go to war against each other ... (oops - sorry - wrong dystopia)

The new RFID chips have a 128-bit ROM for storing a unique 38 digit number, like their predecessor. Hitachi used semiconductor miniaturization technology and electron beams to write data on the chip substrates to achieve the new, smaller size.

Hitachi's mu-chips are already in production; they were used to prevent ticket forgery at last year's Aichi international technology exposition. RFID 'powder,' on the other hand, is so much smaller that it can easily be incorporated into thin paper, like that used in paper currency and gift certificates.

...

These devices could also be used to identify and track people. For example, suppose you participated in some sort of protest or other organized activity. If police agencies sprinkled these tags around, every individual could be tracked and later identified at leisure, with powerful enough tag scanners.

To put it in the context of popular culture, see the picture below, which was taken from the 1996 movie Mission Impossible. One of the IMF operatives places a tracking tag on the shoulder of a computer programmer. Pretty clunky-looking tag...

I know why they don't design a "nano-factory" that is an assembler that uses the basic building blocks of DNA to transmit a unique code ... and then lets inject everyone at birth with these "nano-identiy chips" such that everyone is trackable all the time ... lets start each code with "666" shall we ...

ooops - sorry wrong dystopia - again

I really must try and be more optimistic about the useful uses of technology in the 21st century - carping on about human rights, privacy and surveillance just doesn't hack it anymore - because nobody cares.

Tags: rfid dust, big brother, rfid, nano-chips, nano-warfare, dystopia, surveillance, tracking

Posted by Dr. K at 6:34 PM | Permalink

A woman speaks and makes it quite plain that "The Enemy at Home" - is women - if you are some kind of fundamentalist that is ...

What threatens patriarchal Muslim communities are not the excesses of Western societies but its very norms. Individualism and the relatively equal position of women manifest themselves in the opportunities females have to pursue education and economic independence.

There is no way that Muslim women, in great numbers, can be granted similar opportunities without it eventually shaking their societies at their very foundations. Whatever else the Taliban is obtuse about, they understand perfectly the concept of the slippery slope — allow a girl child to be educated at all, and you never know where she will end up — perhaps like me, with only tangential ties to some of the core values of the conservative Islamic community I was raised in.

The problem with fundamentalists everywhere - is that they are fundamentalists. They can only look at reality through their fundamentalist tunnel vision - everything else is obscured and fuzzy around the edges ...

They believe that their "book" (whatever it may be) is the fundamental unchanging word of G-d - never to be questioned and never to be changed - no matter how much pain and suffering their interpretation causes ...

All I can say is that it is a good job that Fanny Cradock never wrote a book - because then women really would be "The Enemy at Home" ...

Tags: cooking, women's rights, fanny cradock, the enemy at home, dinesh d’souza, new cold war

Posted by Dr. K at 8:46 PM | Permalink

Funny isn't it - once you ditch all your preconceptions and open your mind - support comes from the oddest places ..

In this case Boris Johnson - of The Telegraph - somebody who works for a newspaper I wouldn't have thought to link to normally ...

Women now make up 57 per cent of university entrants, and they outnumber men in every subject — including maths and engineering. This thing is huge, and it is happening at every level, and no one seems to be thinking about the consequences.

Most trainee barristers and two thirds of medical students are now women — compared with 29 per cent women in the early 1990s. If current trends continue, most doctors will be female by 2012. It is ludicrous for the Equal Opportunities Commission to keep droning on about "glass ceilings" at the top of corporate Britain, or in the judiciary, when you think how fast this transformation has been.

It is a stunning fact — the biggest social revolution of our lifetime — that far more women than men are now receiving what is in theory an elite academic education. When I was at university 20 years ago, the figures were almost exactly the other way round, with the ratio 60:40 in favour of males. Far more female graduates are coming out of our universities than male graduates — and, in 30 years' time, when these people reach the peak of their careers, the entire management structure of Britain will have been transformed and feminised.

Interesting - and I have to ask - are countries that hold down women and refuse them an education - or even the right to drive - progressing as quickly?

Or is the "West" just a "decadent society" that needs to be changed in some way because it grants equal rights to women?

Tags: new cold war, boris johnson, telegraph, women's rights, feminism

Posted by Dr. K at 6:56 PM | Permalink